Melbourne Fringe stages Richard II

John Bailey

Conjure up the spirit of Melbourne Fringe and you're likely picturing something fresh, unfamiliar, cutting edge or avant-garde. That's a big part of the festival, for sure, but it overlooks the fact that any fringe festival also tells tales harking back centuries or more.

This is not a new story, but one of making old stories new. After all, even Shakespeare and his contemporaries did their share of borrowing.

Reworked: Richard II's tale of a deposed king had been dancing around in Mark Wilson's head. Photo: Justin McManus

Mark Wilson describes himself as a Shakespeare Man. He's read all of the Bard's works, and he reads 'em a lot. His last round in the ring with Shakespeare was the solo show Unsex Me, and it was as radical a rethinking of Shakespeare's Macbeth as you're likely to find. Wilson played a character named "Mark Wilson" playing an outrageous actress herself playing the role of Lady Macbeth. It was a head-spinning collision of performance art, drag, in-your-face monologue and meta-theatre. Sell-out shows led to no less than eight seasons of the work.

It seems paradoxical that the most iconic of texts can afford the greatest freedom to artists, but that often seems to be the case. It's extremely rare in the English-speaking world to find a director who'll radically reimagine a work written in the last few decades, but it's equally rare to find a "straight" production of anything more than a hundred or so years of age.

Elizabeth I is reputed to have said "I am no fool; I am Richard II," says Wilson, and his interest in the play is partly in how a leader's manipulation of his or her own public persona plays a crucial role in politics.

The problem Richard II presents today is the sheer volume of English history stuffed into the original. "There's scene after scene of Lord so-and-so and Lord so-and-so," says Wilson, "and in one sense it's not as strong a play as Richard III, which is much more accessible as a villain play. You can just enjoy that rollicking ride with Richard III."

That's one of the reasons older works are constantly reworked and remixed more than recent plays. As times change, so does a text's relevance. Wilson is just as fascinated by the points at which Shakespeare's metaphors lose us, and why they no longer resonate across time. It's partly why so few productions of any Shakespearean play don't involve at least some cutting of lines, scenes or even entire characters.

Gertraud Ingeborg and David Ritchie's Fringe production of King Lear takes that paring back to an extreme. The full play regularly runs to more than three hours and features a dozen significant roles. Ritchie and Ingeborg deliver the same story in 60 minutes with just two actors.

"It's hard to believe," says Ingeborg. But the pair have decades of experience in Australia and regularly perform in Europe and New York (where Ingeborg recently played alongside Cate Blanchett in A Streetcar Named Desire). This work came after the pair presented a similarly abbreviated version of Hamlet for students in Italy and were challenged to give Lear a shot.

"At first we thought 'well, that's impossible.' But then we looked at it and it actually works very well."

Ingeborg says their distillation of the play comes from a desire to get to its essence rather than meddle unnecessarily. "We have great respect for the language," she says. "We're not trying to do something modern, different for the sake of being different. Just a very clear mini-King Lear."

There's a hint of Japanese minimalism to the production: the silk robes that signal character changes, most obviously, but also in the economy with which every line and gesture is performed. "We have to be very precise with our movements. We don't wander around the stage.

Everything that we do is quite precise. That's very important so that it's very, very clear who we are and what we're doing."

That kind of focus is important to Wilson, too. "I'm not interested in productions that just update an aesthetic and that's it. I'm interested in productions that are investigations. Like the German word for 'rehearsal' means 'to probe'. I think that's really good. You've got to probe."

Another reason the classics encourage experimentation comes from the way artists can use our familiarity with a story as a shortcut.

When writer Jane Miller decided to approach the story of Oedipus, she discovered that "the fact that the basic elements of the story are so well known has given us a freedom to explore the other things about it that we're interested in".

"Most people, when you say 'Oedipus', think 'the king who killed his father and married his mother'. It's a one-sentence plot that people already know. And within that are so many colours and layers that we can play with and things we can strip back or add in that make the work unique but still maintain the fundamental knowledge that these are the events of the story."

The result is Motherf---er: A Love Story, which draws on existing adaptations of the Oedipus myth from the likes of Seneca, Sophocles and Ted Miller along with original text written by Miller and work devised on the rehearsal room floor. While traditional takes on the myth usually trace the narrative from the perspective of the ill-fated king, Miller was more interested in amplifying the voice of Jocasta, his mother and eventual lover.

"We wondered what the years were between when her child is taken away to when she meets and marries Oedipus," she says. "What's that story?

As a writer you're always looking for new elements, even within a very traditional story like this. I found really exciting that even though I had read many versions of these plays, now I feel like I know them a lot more because I've burrowed into the parts that I find new and hadn't considered before."

The story's classic status allows Miller to juxtapose that intimate investigation of a real relationship with the more timeless themes that are so fundamental to its enduring power: "The element of trangression, the notion of crime, the inescapability of your fate. Things that are really at the core of being human."

But while hallowed texts may be interpreted differently or translated into new forms, there will always be those who decry those straying too far from the one true path. Theatrical texts, like religious texts, can accrue followers who view them as scripture.

Stephanie Osztreicher's Holy Dying offers a more literal angle on the problems of adapting a sacred text – she's presenting a secular adaptation of a book that's actually a religious work.

While studying performance in Paris several years ago she was browsing the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company and happened upon an 18th-century edition of a 1651 text by Jeremy Taylor. "The purpose of it is to show the reader towards a divine death," she says.

"What interested me is what this idea of a holy death might be if you're not religious. Jeremy Taylor used such beautiful language relating a life to nature and to the world around you, but it made me think OK, without thinking about what comes next after life, what do we do to make our own holy death?"

Rather than a letter-perfect translation to the stage, Osztreicher has reimagined Taylor's words through physical theatre and live music as well as language. "There are a lot of anecdotes he uses within the story which are very visual, so I'm transposing some of the stories into movement and taking the text away."

She's aware that subtracting the religion from a Christian text might be seen as a bold move, and insists her intention is not to offend.

But that's a challenge inherent in any process of adaptation, spiritual or otherwise. "There will be purists and I think it's to be expected.

But as the world around us changes we need to re-evaluate questions.

"However you adapt, even if it's as closely as possible, something is lost from the original. You can either embrace that or apologise for it. What I'm doing is going to the extreme where I'm quite aware it will take on different meanings but I'm going to push that instead of apologise for doing it."

There's a final reason artists experiment with the classics more often than they do with more contemporary works, and it might not be apparent from the examples so far, which are each ultimately respectful towards their source. When it comes to doing some seriously unauthorised renovations on a play, you're far more likely to get in strife if the playwright or their heirs are still around to object.

The estates of Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller, for instance, are notoriously keen-eyed when it comes to productions that stray too far from the intentions of their authors.

The 2012 production of Death of a Salesman at Sydney's Belvoir Theatre found itself in trouble after altering the ending of Miller's famous play. That's enough to put a little fear into comedian Danny McGinlay as his satirical rendering of the same work is readied for this year's Fringe.

Death of a Salesman: the Sitcom has the same overall structure and characters as its source but McGinlay has "definitely changed enough that if Arthur Miller's estate is reading this they cannot sue". "They are a bit litigious. I'll be honest, I'm a bit nervous that I'll get a call that ruins everything, but my experts have told me that there's a satire provision in Australian copyright law."

The show reinvents the classic as an '80s sitcom in the vein of Cheers or Perfect Strangers, with a live audience in a TV studio for the taping of hit comedy "The Loman Empire". Miller's play is a famously downbeat dismantling of the American Dream. "Our version's a bit more uplifting," says McGinlay. "There's a lot more hugging and talking about what they learnt."

The object of the show's barbs isn't the play of its title, he says, but the TV he grew up with. "We're celebrating Arthur's work but satirising the sitcom oeuvre. I wouldn't dare take the piss out of such a beloved play. Whereas taking the piss out of Full House? Hell yeah."

There is something poignant about the seemingly incongruous collision of genres, too: where Miller's play depicts the nuclear family and middle-class aspirations as tragic, the same situation was the basis for almost every '80s TV comedy.

"As much as it goes against my politics, I love the Reaganism of them," says McGinlay. "How family is the most important thing, and we're all middle-class white people because God has blessed us. It's just saccharine crap."

Then again, he points out, those comedies reside in an existential space that's more troubling the more you think about it. "Isn't the definition of a tragedy where the character is already doomed to fail?

And in a sitcom the characters are always going to be in the exact same position that they started in. The get-rich-quick scheme won't work, they'll go on a date but it'll go badly. So I guess all the great sitcoms are tragedies."